Oliver Contreras/Sipa USA via AP Images
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) speaks to reporters at the Capitol, September 30, 2021, in Washington.
This is the 30th year of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), but in another sense, today is the first day. It’s the first day Washington has seen a coherent, organized coalition in Congress wielding power from the left. And it has the congressional leadership confused.
In the past, whenever the Democratic leadership needed a vote on some compromised piece of whatever, they would lean on the Progressive Caucus with hackneyed phrases like “half a loaf is better than nothing” or “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” and caucus members would give in. There wasn’t much of a strategy to keep the caucus together and voting as a bloc, to force their ideas into the conversation. There wasn’t much of a strategy, period.
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Throughout the 1990s, a guy named Bernie Sanders was the chair, but he started with a caucus of only six, and picked up just a handful more throughout the decade. In the 2000s, CPC membership was more of a signaling device for the political base back home than anything resembling an ideological commitment; several members were simultaneously part of the centrist New Democrat Coalition or even the Blue Dog Caucus. There was so little unanimity that the caucus went with co-chairs from 2003 to 2021, and this didn’t mean twice the organizing. The People’s Budget the caucus introduced every year was a good model of left ideas, but it was seen as a moral victory to get 100 or so votes.
This began to change after the 2018 midterms, when the ranks of the caucus jumped by 18 members, up to a high-water mark of 96. Younger and more aggressive members sought more coherence from a left coalition, and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) were more on the same page than previous co-chairs. Their one substantive achievement was to push House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s signature drug pricing bill, H.R. 3, to the left, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies on more medications, and ensuring that private insurance payers would also benefit from the overall reform. The bill still maintained Pelosi’s framework, but progressives were able to improve it, because they initially withheld their votes.
Pelosi insisted that Jayapal and Pocan would not impact the bill, banking on the probability that she could pick off members one by one. But it didn’t work, and she did have to negotiate with the CPC on the final bill, when she wanted to ignore them entirely.
That bill has become the basis of the drug pricing reform in the Build Back Better Act, with everything that progressives forced into the bill remaining intact. But despite that happening only two years ago, memories were apparently short among the leadership.
As far back as when President Biden released two bills for his infrastructure agenda in late March, there was a two-track strategy for passage in Congress. The physical-infrastructure elements could entice enough Republicans in the Senate to cross the 60-vote filibuster threshold and get through regular order, and the human-infrastructure elements would go through the budget reconciliation process, requiring only Democrats. Before long, Biden, Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer all endorsed this strategy, not only on how the bills would be handled, but their order of passage: The Senate would have to pass both bills before the House took them up. This would bridge the lack of trust among members of Congress in their colleagues and the institution itself.
The gang of ten House members led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), and the Manchinema (Sinemanchin?) caucus in the Senate, broke that deal. They wanted the physical-infrastructure bill passed first, and only then would they move to the human-infrastructure provisions.
An overlooked piece of Manchin’s ransom note that he belatedly released yesterday stated that negotiations should not commence on the reconciliation process until October 1. That was roughly the same deadline House members made for voting on the Senate-passed infrastructure bill. That was quiet evidence for the corporate Dems’ desire to de-link the two bills, the preferred strategy of their finance and pharma industry backers, who abhorred the tax increases and drug price reforms in the second bill and saw de-linking as a way to kill it.
At this point, we got the familiar trajectory from Pelosi. Having promised Gottheimer a late-September infrastructure bill vote, and having promised progressives a two-track strategy, she broke the promise to the progressives, and sought to blow right past them this week. And if this were the Progressive Caucus of 20, or 10, or even 5 years ago, Pelosi probably would have succeeded.
Jayapal smartly got the two-track promise from leadership early enough to rally around it.
But this is a completely different animal. At the beginning of this Congress, Jayapal, an organizer before she got to Congress, created new rules to facilitate voting as a bloc. She also elevated Squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and frontline member Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) as top deputies. Not only are they effective communicators and organizers, but the different perspectives of someone in a safe seat and a swing seat spanned the gamut of the caucus.
Jayapal smartly got the two-track promise from leadership early enough to rally around it. By associating it, correctly, with the Biden agenda, she split the opposition from their standard-bearer. And she was able over months to build numbers to demand the original deal. It didn’t hurt that Manchin and Sinema simply refused to engage on particulars, and that the infrastructure bill, negotiated by Democrats and Republicans, was to progressives less than half a loaf, with its disproportionate emphasis on fossil fuels and bending to corporate giants.
Ultimately, nearly 30 members publicly opposed Pelosi’s de-linking efforts, with Jayapal having close to another 30 in her back pocket. Pelosi delayed the infrastructure vote from Monday to Thursday, and then gave up on Thursday night. Negotiations in both chambers on the broader deal continue, but there’s a recognition that only negotiation, not steamrolling, will get the infrastructure bill passed into law.
This is a genuinely new position for the CPC. They are using their numbers to enforce terms on legislation. I do have the sense that Pelosi didn’t mind failing on Thursday, if only to show her corporate Dems, and more to the point Manchin and Sinema, that they had no choice but to make a deal. Pointedly, Manchin publicly released his opening bid only when he realized this; likewise, Sinema had to release a defensive-sounding statement.
This is only one round. Manchin’s topline spending figure is $1.5 trillion, although the White House has been trying to fashion a solution where tax cuts don’t count toward that. Manchin seems OK with some taxes but not with too much spending; Sinema seems OK with some spending, especially on climate, but not with any taxes. Maybe that’s by design or maybe that’s not. It’s definitely going to be wrenching to find a solution that progressives can live with. And progressives should be as attuned to the particulars of these bills as the topline numbers and litany of programs.
But holding the line (as the hashtag goes) gives something the Progressive Caucus has not had much of in its history: respect. They have established themselves as a force in this Congress. Success on the Biden agenda runs through them. That doesn’t guarantee success; from this point on, it only gets harder. But the CPC will have to be taken seriously in the Capitol—by leadership and perhaps even more importantly by the media—for perhaps the first time.
This is a prerequisite to winning the ideological argument and setting priorities within the party. In the long run, that’s the most important potential outcome, more important than any infrastructure bill.
